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The Woman Who Discovered the Key to Measuring the Universe
By the late 1800s, astronomy had moved on from simple human observation to the collection of images of the sky on photographic plates — pieces of glass coated with light-sensitive silver salts. At the...
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Trust no one, and other lessons I learned from physics reporters
As I’ve been thinking about the challenges facing science journalism, a little voice in my head has been murmuring, “Yes, but isn’t all this navel-gazing a bit biology-centric?” Number one on my list...
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Why the eclipse mattered.
I have been hearing about Sunday’s annular eclipse for weeks. Earlier this month, I visited my parents in Albuquerque, and the eclipse was all my dad could talk about. Dad, known to the rest of the...
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Chasing Transits
CELESTE: How long this time? LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more. CELESTE: What if you miss it? LE GENTIL: The...
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Union and Reunion
Splendid, isn’t it. It’s UGC 8335 — one name, so once it was apparently mistaken for one thing though obviously it’s two. They’re spiral galaxies in the process of running into and through each other....
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Redux: Auditing Astronomy Class
This was first published in Dec 6, 2011 — it was originally a guest post, Cameron wasn’t yet an LWONer — and was honorable-mentioned for the American Institute of Physics’ 2012 science writing prize in...
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Reading Sci-Fi with Astrobioloigist David Grinspoon
David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own new book, Earth In Human...
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Guest Post: The Weight of the Eclipse
2017 was the year of the Great American Eclipse, and I live in its path. I also write about the Earth, moon, and sun for a living. So I was determined to not only cover the eclipse, but own it. Like...
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Guest Post: Warm Feelings About the Void (A Rebuttal)
Last week Cassandra Willyard wrote that space bores her, and argued that astronomy writers need to highlight the human drama to hook her and other spacephobes. This is my response. This essay being one...
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Rejoice, For Mars Retrograde Is Finally Almost Over
The other day at brunch, as two of my friends and I were commiserating about things varied and universal, we agreed about the sluggish pace of our brains. What an injustice, I ventured, that our...
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Bennu: The Hype is Real
For the past two years, I have been following the voyage of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft headed to an asteroid called Bennu. Bennu is important for at least four reasons: Local space history may recorded...
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You Cannot Prove A Negative. Does That Mean We’ll Search Forever?
The TESS telescope is a shiny little thinking metal tube, drinking the light of 20 million stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It launched last year on a voyage to identify planets that look like this...
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Auditing Astronomy Class
It’s my mom’s birthday today, so I thought I’d revisit this post about a time when she audited an astronomy class. This semester, she’s taking French. Bon anniversaire, maman. I’m not sure exactly...
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Guest Post: What It’s Like to Peer Through Hubble
For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait. Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill...
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Happy Solstice! Look Up and Feel Your Place in the Universe
In this year of darkness, today brings something to celebrate. Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, which means the light will finally start returning. And this year, the first day of...
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Science Poem: To the Sylacauga Meteorite
NOTE: The images in this post are best viewed on a desktop device or tablet, not a phone. One dim November afternoon in Alabama in 1954, 34-year-old Ann Hodges curled up on her couch, pulled the...
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Star Party
One cold night a couple of weeks ago, my family and I bundled up to bike out to a park in one of Seattle’s northern suburbs. We have a routine for such trips after all these years. First we layer, and...
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Eclipse
Eclipse The earth moved to follow his smile, but she stood aside, let the planet pass. Her signs were subtler: quivers of little stars, the sucking dark depths of the ocean. Young women turned their...
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Conversation: Richard & the Pillars of Creation
ANN: Richard Panek has just published a book called The Pillars of Creation. It’s about the James Webb Space Telescope — which I call JWST and Richard calls Webb, and there’s a story behind that...
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Our Moon
Last week, Ann wrote about her moon epiphany and Our Becky’s book (Ann: “Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award”) about our most...
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